Belief in a "higher power" could be the statistical likelihood of an alien race on the other side of the universe who have technology a little more advanced than ours.

A higher power could also be an omnipresent intelligence with no interest what so ever in human affairs.

In my opinion the whole debate should be using a terminology regarding spiritual awareness and not of religion since the latter is much more loaded with assumptions which biases the results. This way an atheist could actively be pursuing a personal spiritual program.

Certainly, but by that position, people who "do not believe in a higher power" is a subset of people who "do not believe in God" so Sweden has at least 41% non-theists then.

I certainly didn't mean to say that.

Are you saying that people who don't believe in advanced alien tech also do not believe in God? Or am I having a mental breakdown? I'm fairly sure I know what a subset is and its logical implications.

It is straightforward to prove this through mere syllogism, but perhaps the discrepancy arises because you interpret "do not believe in a higher power" as "do not believe in a singular higher power"? In English, "X does not believe in a higher power" translates to the logical statement "For any higher power H, X does not believe in H", and is equivalent to the English statement "X does not believe in any higher power".

To go from there to ((English ("X does not believe in a higher power")) logically implies (English ("X does not believe in God"))) is trivial. And that is the definition of a subset A of B: \forall x \in A, x \in B

Oh I see, you believe in the law of the excluded middle. I'm more of a constructivist myself.

Haha, an entertaining conclusion to this conversation. I enjoyed that.